Re: [Qemu-devel] cry for help: wiki.qemu.org spam

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 01:14:11PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> The amount of spam our wiki.qemu.org collects, is
> increasing every day.  It was easy several months
> ago to manually delete these pages once a week to
> keep wiki spam-free, now they sometimes manage to
> re-create a page while I delete it!
> 
> No, it is not counted in 1000s per day - not yet
> anyway.  But 10..20 new users with the same amount
> of new spam pages per day become a norm.
> 
> To see how it looks like, see the RecentChanges:
> 
>  http://wiki.qemu.org/Special:RecentChanges
> 
> There, each new user adds one spam page.  And see
> this link
> 
>  http://wiki.qemu.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidebots=0
> 
> to see my actions too.
> 
> What complicates things alot for me is the fact
> that now, after wiki changes, *every* "Delete page"
> operation takes 30..60 seconds to complete, and
> during all this time the wiki is not doing anything.
> This should be fixed too, I think.
> 
> Now, I think the best course is to restrict new
> user creation, require moderation for new users.
> The best will be to ask them to write some words
> in the confirmation email as of why they want the
> account, -- so that the moderator will be able to
> tell somewhat if this is for real or not; but I've
> no idea if such a feature exists in mediawiki.
> 
> I can play moderational role, -- this at least should
> be significantly easier than my current delete page
> approach.
> 
> And if not, I'd love to see Nuke extension enabled --
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Nuke -- which
> should help with page deletion.
> 
> Any other suggestions are ofcourse welcome.

On the KVM mediawiki (and all the others I maintain) I enabled the Math
question captcha which has pretty much solved the problem of bots now.

NB, you need to tweak it to use custom form field names, since bots can
detect it & auto-fill the questions if you use the default form names.

Daniel
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